How to Electronically Stabilise Home Videos (EIS) in Google Photos App

Google Photos is one of Google’s most successful projects in recent history with Photos hitting over 1 billion installs just this month. One feature that went unnoticed by many users is the recent update that allows users to stabilise videos using electronic image stabilisation (software stabilisation). Unlike identifying faces, generating special videos & album generation; this feature is not done automatically from Google’s servers. Instead, it uses the power of your phone to stabilise the videos directly.

While features like Assistant and Facial Recognition make the app so delightful to use, it still lacks features like advanced editing options and better organisation capabilities which were present in Google Plus’s old Photos interface. Still, it’s miles ahead of the competition thanks to Google’s advanced AI capabilities.

Stabilise Videos in Google Photos App

How to Stabilise Videos

Step 1 – Launch the Google Photos app and navigate to the videos page.

Navigate to videos

Step 2 – Open the video you’d like to stabilise, and press the Edit icon (pencil icon) at the bottom left.

Left to right: How to stabilise videos

Step 3 – Select the Stabilise button. Now, wait for the Photos app to download the original video to the phone and then stabilise the video using the phone’s CPU. The app also additionally lets you rotate the videos between portrait & landscape, or trim the clip.
Step 4 – Once the video is stabilised you can press Play to preview the stabilised clip and then press Save to upload the changes to the cloud.

Press the blue Stabilised button to undo changes

To revert back you can always press the Edit icon and press the blue coloured Stabilised button to undo the changes.

To access the stored stabilised videos for sharing, you can share directly from the photos app or navigate to DCIM->Photos Editor (folder) located in your internal or external storage depending on where you’ve chosen to store the photos.

Samples to Demonstrate Video Stabilisation

From left to right: Stabilised video vs original video

Sample 1 Shot using a budget smartphone running Lineage OS. Not the most ideal output.

Sample 2 Shot using a mirrorless camera that houses a Sony APSC sensor. The output looks a lot nicer even though it’s at the expense of a loss in quality.

From personal use, I can say that the feature gives out varying results. This is because when electronically stabilising video, the algorithm usually crops the video and can also cause distortion or perspective shifts at times. It may be obvious but I found the app to be much better at stabilising videos shot from a professional camera and outputted worse results when stabilising videos shot with my phone due to differences in how each device handles video recording.

Google Photos [Free]

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